Hawking's just one of the science and engineering luminaries who'll feature in
Genius of Britain: The scientists that changed the world, a five-night series that'll hit British TV screens tonight. The line-up of presenters - most of whom joined Hawking in person at the series' launch last week - includes David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins, Paul Nurse, James Dyson, Kathy Sykes, Robert Winston, Olivia Judson and Jim Al-Khalili.

Airing on commercial TV station Channel Four, the series aims to illustrate how much everyday technology stems from the British tradition of invention - a tradition that is in danger of dying out. One aim of the show is to help quell the hordes of kids applying for "soft" options like media studies or finance.

This beautifully illustrated book claims to contain "the 50 most thought-provoking theories in science, each explained in half a minute".

"Explained" might be a stretch. After all, there's only so much one can garner about quantum theory or sociobiology from a few brief paragraphs.

Still, there's much food for thought on topics from natural selection to information theory. Expert contributors present difficult concepts as simply and succinctly as possible, and each entry comes with a "3-minute thought" for readers willing to invest an additional 180 seconds. (As the bit on relativity explains, those 180 seconds will take you much further if you happen to be travelling at close to the speed of light.)

30-Second Theories is the kind of book that can spark curiosity and inspire you to seek more information, and would make a lovely gift for the inquisitive non-scientist in your life.

Book Information30-Second Theories: The 50 most thought-provoking theories in science, each explained in half a minute by Paul Parsons
Icon Books
£12.99

Are you a voyeur? Or just a bit nosey? Happier watching from the fringes than in the thick of it? Don't be too hard on yourself: technology may be to blame, as you'll see if you visit Exposed: Voyeurism, surveillance and the camera, an exhibition that opens at Tate Modern in London tomorrow, before moving to the US later in the year.

This is not for those who like their photography to be painterly: you won't find the classical poise and technical perfection of an Ansel Adams landscape or an Edward Weston nude here. It's the candid snapshot, the surveillance camera, the photojournalist and the paparazzo that are the stars of this show.

We're unhappily familiar with the ways that new imaging technology can be used to satisfy old-fashioned desires - just think how the proliferation of cameraphones has brought a surge in "upskirting", or taking surreptitious photos up a woman's skirt. But the first thing that Exposed reveals is that the urge to snap people unawares is almost as old as photography itself.

UNDER what circumstances does a suspect's confession increase the chance that they are innocent? What is the smallest fence you can build around a square patch of land to stop someone seeing across it? Is it possible to build a maze composed of rules and instructions rather than yew bushes?

These are just some of the "mathematical explorations" - some serious, others delightfully trivial - tackled by Cows in the Maze, a collection of 21 stand-alone chapters that originally appeared as columns in Scientific American.

Be warned: this is not a book you can casually flick through. To get to grips with the underlying mathematics - usually explained in detail with illustrations - requires serious mental effort, not to mention a pen and paper or counters. But if you like a challenge, or happen to have a lightning-fast brain, you will be rewarded.

Book Information:Cows in the Maze: And other mathematical explorations by Ian Stewart
Oxford University Press
£8.99

In 1982, the physicist Hugh Everett III died, broken by depression and addiction. He left his papers in boxes, stacked in the basement of his family home in Virginia. Peter Byrne took on the task of opening the boxes and piecing together the story they contained. This labour of love has resulted in a book that is by turns fascinating, perplexing and harrowing.

Everett's idea is now known as the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. According to Everett, a new universe is created every time we measure the position of an atom, the spin of an electron, or the energy of a light photon. Though it sounds as outlandish today as it did on first publication, for many physicists this is now the interpretation of choice when confronted with the mysteries of the quantum world.

Byrne does an excellent job of explaining the theory, why it is necessary and the difficulties it solves (and doesn't). But that is only half the story. The other half deals with the strange and troubled man behind the idea.

Memory is intimate, emotive, aesthetically lavish - and electrochemically encoded in the biostuff between our ears. Offering all that to play with, the physical mechanism of remembering would seem an obvious subject for an art-science enterprise.

Yet according to neuroscientist Hugo Spiers of University College London, he and his two collaborators - an artist and a sound designer - are the first to do anything about it. The result, on show last weekend in the gallery Gimpel Fils, located in the staggeringly expensive Mayfair district of central London, is called Pattern Completion. It's been funded by the Wellcome Trust, the fairy godmother of sci-art in the UK.

It's a cluster of four glowing glass globes hanging at eye level in a dim, windowless room. A concealed video projector illuminates the frosted rear of each globe: peer inside them and you'll see images of woodland, time-lapse photographs that reveal the movement of plants swaying in the wind as each frame dissolves into the next, until an abrupt cut changes the scene. You might notice that the view you were watching has jumped to another globe, or that in another still a scene has continued unchanged. On wireless headphones, meanwhile, you hear bird calls, the sound of wind in leaves and rushing water in sequences that change with the images.

IN DECEMBER 2005, Judge John Jones III had a difficult decision to make. For 40 days he had listened to the testimonies of biologists, sociologists, philosophers and parents as they argued for and against the teaching of intelligent design in public schools in Dover, Pennsylvania.

It was obvious that the proponents of ID were trying to push a religious agenda into government-funded schools, violating the separation of church and state. Nonetheless, Judge Jones's task was not simple. He had to rule on whether or not ID is science, and distinguishing science from pseudoscience is harder than it might seem.

Martin Gardner, who died on Saturday in Norman, Oklahoma, may be best-known today as an author of mathematical puzzles. Yet his most important contribution to scientific literacy is an entirely and wonderfully different book, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.

As its title implies, Fads and Fallacies challenges crackpots and frauds. I picked it up in my teens, when I was fascinated by rogues, eccentrics and scoundrels of all sorts, from Gilded Age financiers to flying saucer fans. Gardner wrote it in the 1950s, it made fascinating reading when I found it in the 1960s, and it remains full of important lessons for today.

One crucial lesson is to be entertaining. It's terribly easy to write worthy books full of righteous indignation, scolding fools for their foolishness and trying to lead them to scientific truth. That's the stuff of cold showers and gruel: "good for you" by someone else's definition, but not terribly appetizing.

Fads and Fallacies is fun. Gardner had wit and wasn't afraid to use it. He also collected an amazing cast of characters.

It looks like a view across distant mountains, Japanese-style: delicate and possibly painted on rice paper. I haven't wanted to have a piece of artwork so badly for my living room in a long time.

Luckily, since it is bound to be too expensive for me, an art gallery A-lister has already put a bid in for Chris Drury's Under The Ice, Over The Unknown (a detail from Flight G23).

This (see picture, left: click to enlarge) is my favourite piece in a show called Experiments, the first in a series curated by Artakt and GV Art, featuring the art of five artists who work closely with scientists.

Drury is one of a handful of British "land artists": a protest art movement, dating back to the 1960s and 70s, in which art and nature are inextricably interwoven and the artists often use natural material as such soil, rock or sand.

In Under the Ice, art and nature could hardly be more interwoven since the artwork is pencil and ink on an inkjet print, based on real echograms of layers of ice.

In the film Avatar, the blue-skinned Na'vi inhabit the lush moon of a gas-giant planet. What would life be like if Earth were such a moon?

Neil Comins investigates this possibility, along with nine other tweaks that might make our cosmic neighbourhood subtly - or fundamentally - different. What if the moon orbited Earth backwards? What if our solar system were located in the centre of our galaxy, rather than in the suburbs?

Counterfactual science is not everyone's cup of tea, but the author's pedigree as an astronomer at the University of Maine ensures the physics is rock-solid in this, his second venture into the genre. While the exploration of the knock-on consequences for life housed on these alien worlds is just a bit of speculative fun, it makes for a fascinating read nonetheless.

Book information:What if the Earth had Two Moons? And nine other thought-provoking speculations on the solar system by Neil Comins
St Martin's Press
£17.99/$26.99

Recently she began wondering what a Higgs-producing event inside the LHC's ATLAS detector might sound like. So she got together with particle physicists, musicians and artists to create the LHCsound project.

I asked her how the project worked and what we might learn by turning physics into music.

WEAVER ants, marauder ants, army ants and slave-makers - Mark Moffett has studied, been bitten by and photographed them all. Moffett examines the idea of ants as superorganisms and looks at ways in which their colonies resemble, yet differ from, human societies. As superorganisms, they possess many advantages: a weaver ant colony weighs as much as a young leopard, but the ants can eat prey as small as mites or as large as scorpions. In the same environment, the leopard would starve because it needs much bigger meals.

Adventures Among Ants ends with an obvious parable. The Argentine ant, Linepithema humile, is now found almost everywhere, from southern Europe to California, and it is the only ant species on Easter Island. In most countries, its colonies, billions strong and extending hundreds of kilometres, exterminate every other ant community they encounter. And like humans, they now travel by ship and airplane.

Book information by Mark MoffettPublished by University of California Press£20.95/$29.95

But, in addition to being a physicist, Haisch is also a man of God. Before entering science, he entered a seminary, fully intending to become a Catholic priest. Now he has a deep desire to square the science he pursues with his religious conviction.

In The Purpose-Guided Universe, Haisch makes his case for a physical cosmos that is deity-driven. The principal piece of evidence he uses is the apparent fine-tuning of the laws of physics for us to be here.

IF YOU can stand the bad jokes and get past the irritating title, Flipnosis offers some powerful insights into the art and science of getting people to do what you want. Kevin Dutton, who lectures at the University of Cambridge, follows the vogue in popular psychology for trying to boil down complex behaviours into simple formulae. Apparently, the most successful persuasion involves five essential factors or traits - simplicity, perceived self-interest, incongruity, confidence and empathy - a blueprint Dutton describes as "the genome of the most powerful strain of influence on the planet".

Elsewhere he talks of uncovering a meta-cognitive "master key" to persuasion, and entertains the hope that scientists will one day isolate a "persuasion pathway" in the brain.

PEOPLE tend to have strong opinions about geoengineering - large-scale manipulation of the environment to counteract global warming. These opinions are often highly polarised and, thanks in part to media coverage, usually focus on two extremes. On the one hand, there is the view that geoengineering is the quick-and-easy fix to all of our climate troubles; on the other, we find a picture of mad scientists destroying the world. Unfortunately, both narratives have marketable traction.

Thankfully we now have two books on the subject, written by respected science writers, which paint a more realistic and multicoloured landscape of the options, opportunities and threats that are usually so brutally oversimplified.

The books cover much of the same ground, and both Jeff Goodell and Eli Kintisch have researched the subject in depth. They have also penned deft portraits of geoengineering's more colourful characters - of whom there are quite a few.

The "ship tracks" in this satellite photo are clouds seeded by particles in the exhaust of ship engines - could this be what geoengineering cloud cover to reflect more sunlight back out to space would look like? (Image: NASA)

What are we to make of an adult man who leads an online life in which his avatar is an 11-year-old girl?

Inhabitants of Second Life, the online virtual world where this man/girl hangs out, are not troubled by such questions. The ability to explore alternative identities is what attracts many people there in the first place.

For the rest of us, we can find some answers in Life 2.0, a carefully-produced documentary about the real physical lives of Second Lifers.

Filmmaker Jason Spingarn-Koff, who has a background in television science documentaries, either worked hard to track down the right subjects or got very lucky. Their stories are engrossing and, in one case, remarkable. The result is a calm and tender account of Second Life and its impact on three American families.

James Bond saves the world sometimes. So does Captain Kirk. But at least in the movies, superheroes don't - they're too busy fighting personal spats. Here's why superheroes on the big screen should save the world now and then.

High stakes are a crucial part of why we root for a hero. We don't just want the hero to win because we like him or her, but because really bad stuff will happen if s/he loses. And high stakes are also a crucial ingredient of the all-important "hell yeah" moment. The higher the stakes, the greater the triumph when the hero comes through.

But also, there's another reason why higher stakes are often better for a heroic narrative: they make the world seem bigger. The more that's at stake, the more we believe that this hero belongs to a whole world full of real stuff. It's part of world-building, in fact - to convince us that the whole world is at stake, a movie has to show us that world, at least to some extent. Conversely, the lower the stakes, the more claustrophobic and one-horse-town the hero's world is likely to seem.

Plus the higher the stakes, the more noble and altruistic the hero seems. He or she is willing to sacrifice him/herself to save the entire world. You have to award points for that, really. Almost any character flaw or personality tick pales in the face of such nobility. Mother Teresa never stopped Galactus from swallowing up the planet. How many planet-busting bombs did Gandhi defuse? None.

Last, and most important, there's nothing wrong with superheroes being larger than life and having huge, world-shattering adventures. They're superheroes, right?

Explores how attitudes have changed throughout history, from early medical drawings, 19th-century paintings, anatomical models and cultural artefacts, to works by artists such as Damien Hirst, Helen Chadwick and Wim Delvoye. Includes a "Skin Lab" where visitors can experiment with skin-flap models used in plastic surgery, and try on latex skin-suits.

I HAD a student on my Art and Emerging Technologies course who was interested in X-rays; he wanted to dance with a real-time moving image of his skeleton. His approach was to use the internet to familiarise himself with the literature and connect with a researcher in the field. Both the course and his research relied completely on the web and the mutual confidence generated by a shared digital culture.

So how did we get to this point - when an 18-year-old's first instinct is to explore the world in digital terms? Digitisation has changed how we store, access and share data. But going digital has also had profound conceptual implications for both scientists and artists. Scientists have had to reinvent procedures and discover new kinds of data manipulation, while digitisation of image and sound has led to new art forms.

IN AN art-science collaboration, it is important that the artist does not impose a view on the science. Nature has more imagination than we do, so it is best to let it speak for itself. Equally, if either party tries to impose too much - either by riding roughshod over the scientific content or by demanding needless technical accuracy - things can go wrong.

I work on string theory and M-theory, which aim to provide a unified, fundamental description of nature. I have collaborated with artists on a variety of projects, such as pencil sketches of higher-dimensional objects in M-theory and sound installations representing the hidden dimensions. The aim of each collaboration was to show that we must abandon our preconceived ideas about the world in order to really understand it.

The antihero of this book is a mustachioed man who had dreadful luck with women. Three of his brides died accidentally in their baths, but not before they had willed him all their money.

Welcome to Edwardian England; not your usual CSI set. Jane Robins charts how a pattern of murders was uncovered through the actions of the dead women's relatives, a determined policeman and a bevy of cheated women. Bernard Spilsbury, a rising star of forensic science, was tasked with the job of figuring out whether the deaths were accidents or murders.

Forensic science is just one thread in this fascinating book. We read of the "scientific thinking" that pervades the time, and its influence on Arthur Conan Doyle, whose great fictional hero Spilsbury was repeatedly compared to. Many of the book's themes are highly relevant today: the fallibility of forensic science, the dangers of over-interpreting evidence and of overconfident expert witnesses.

Through the lives of the players, Robins puts all this in social context: the plight of young unmarried women, the expectations of society and the rise of the suffragettes. Over all of this looms the threat of war. Not a traditional science book, it ranges much wider: a real ripping yarn.

Book Information:The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath by Jane RobinsPublished by John Murray£16.99

IN 1998 artist Natalie Jeremijenko cloned a walnut tree 1000 times to observe how strictly genetics determines destiny. After exhibiting the plantlets at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, she raised them until they were mature enough to grow outdoors, and then transferred 40 to sidewalk plots. It didn't take long for nurture to overwhelm nature, and for the trees to look less and less alike despite their identical DNA.

Jeremijenko's OneTrees has been deemed a classic example of sci-art, an emerging artistic genre typified by the application of scientific techniques, often in collaboration with lab-based researchers.

OneTrees remains a sci-art benchmark to this day, I believe, though not because the work was a scientific breakthrough. While any geneticist could have predicted the general outcome, the cloned trees have become, in the specific shapes of their branches, unforeseeably complex portraits of their respective environments. OneTrees succeeds because the trees outgrew the nature/nurture debate motivating the work. Scientific methodology blossomed, rather unscientifically, into artistic expression.

IF I were going to curate a new sci-art collaboration, I would want it first to create a fantastic piece of art and then I'd hope that the collaboration would open windows into a new world, illuminating new ways of approaching or communicating things.

In December 2009 I curated Earth: Art of a Changing World at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, in which contemporary artists examined the notion of climate change. Some were concerned when Tracey Emin, one of the artists, told a press conference she was a terrible role model because she leaves her heating and lights on, and flies constantly. But I thought it was perfect because she said what we were all thinking: we know something's changing, we don't know what but we want to come together to show we want to do something.

Art and science have increasingly come to inhabit walled-off worlds, but now the two seem to be forging new links. I asked art historian Martin Kemp what he makes of it

Unusually, you've been involved in both art and science for some decades. What has changed?

When I started out 40 years ago, scientific research into art and anatomy or art-science was seen as interesting but out of the ordinary. A history of art-science collaborations in the intervening years would show substantial activity around the Wellcome Trust, NESTA and a few very motivated artists and scientists, running alongside an explosion in the number of popular science books. The relatively high level of funding available now in the UK for such collaborations is unusual. My friends in the US lament the fact they don't have equivalent funding streams.

(Image: John Baxter)

The public seem to like such collaborations. Why?

Many intelligent, motivated people were interested in art and science but found that a lot of art didn't relate to their lives, and that a lot of science was mightily obscure. There has been a change from the time when art was about formal aesthetic values: painting was about painting, and sculpture about sculpture. Scope for addressing social issues - including science - was very limited. But over time, artists began to feel that art about art was increasingly sterile. They stopped talking to themselves and the critics, and began to tackle real-world issues. Spend a day at London's Wellcome Collection learning about art and the brain these days, and the science becomes more accessible because it is "real" in relation to the art, not about abstract data on cortical regions. At their best, collaborations reunite things that have become radically severed.

People with a delicate constitution should avoid reading What's
Eating You? In this engrossingly gross book, you will follow Eugene
Kaplan, emeritus professor of ecology and conservation at Hofstra
University, as he eviscerates dead seagulls, peers at his daughter's
anus and pokes around in dog excrement in search of parasites.

In one tale, Kaplan recounts how an Australian woman who thought she was
pregnant "gave birth" to an enormous cyst containing tapeworm larvae.
Thankfully, the bilious anecdotes are leavened with lectures on parasite
biology.

In the 40-plus years that the author has been teaching parasitology,
very few of his students have failed. Reading this book it's easy to see
why. Kaplan is a master raconteur. What's more, he has an almost
comical knack of contracting every parasitic infection going, which
serves to bring his stories to life all the more vividly. This is gonzo
parasitology writing at its finest.

Book information:What's Eating You? People and parasites by Eugene Kaplan
Princeton
£18.95/$26.95

Victimless Leather, a prototype of a stitchless jacket grown in a technoscientific "body", 2004, by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr

In the cool interiors of universities and art studios, something is afoot. Artists and scientists are breaking out of their moulds and venturing into each other's territories. Some artists (see above) are doing cutting-edge science, while scientists are making art, and still others are working together to forge something new. What's more, the public can't get enough of the work they produce. But why are these long-separated cultural giants moving closer? And crucially, is anything important emerging? In our "Art meets science" posts, we talk to major players from both worlds, and explore the big challenges facing these collaborations.

(Image: Courtesy of the Tissue Culture & Art Project (Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr)/The Tissue Culture & Art Project is hosted at SymbioticA - The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, The University of Western Australia.)

Art-science collaborations - good, bad or just plain ugly? The very idea of them evokes strong feelings for many, and they are popping up in all sorts of places from galleries to parks to laboratories.

Over the next few days we'll be publishing a series of articles looking at art-science collaborations, and to kick things off we've set up a quick survey.

Whether it's art inspiring science or science directing art, we would like to know what you think about this cultural phenomenon. Are these collaborations a waste of everyone's time, or are they the key to a new way of comprehending universal truths?

DO YOU think your spontaneous, free-spirited take on life makes your behaviour random and unpredictable? Albert-László Barabási takes a different view. Human behaviour, he argues, is predictable due to its "bursty" nature - long periods of low activity interspersed with bursts of high activity. By tracking our past behaviour, Barabási thinks we might be able to predict our future actions.

Bursts opens with the story of Hasan Elahi, an American artist whose work takes him around the globe. Elahi's erratic travel patterns set him apart from the crowd, making him an outlier and attracting the attention of the US Department of Homeland Security. Elahi is the first of many people we are introduced to who take us on "Einsteinian jumps through time and space". One minute Barabási is describing a gun seller who marks his dollar bills so that their movement can be tracked throughout the US, the next we are following Einstein's pattern of letter-writing.

As well as these specific examples, Barabási shows how bursty behaviour can be found everywhere, from online browsing to visits to the doctor. The reasons behind these bursts of activity may vary, but they don't make us any less predictable, he says.

Barabási concludes that we are all simultaneously bursty and quite regular; apparently random but deeply predictable. He foresees a future in which a "Vast Machine" follows our every move, cataloguing human behaviour. Perhaps the large amount of data this would collect will enable us to predict the future, but at what price?

Book information:Bursts: The hidden pattern behind everything we do by Albert-László BarabásiPublished by Dutton$26.95

TICK. Tock. Tick. I would do a much better job reviewing books if the clock in my office didn't thump out the seconds like a crazed drummer. The dog's tail whacks the floor. The floor creaks. How does anyone expect me to write in the midst of this racket?

It doesn't surprise me that many of my fellow writers share my fantasies of a golden bubble of silence. Why else do we have writer's retreats, tucked into sheltering forests or beside pastoral streams (where, frankly, the water gurgles damn noisily)?

(Image: Tammy Hanratty/Corbis)

Three new books embrace this silence-is-golden theme. George Prochnik's In Pursuit of Silence and George Michael Foy's Zero Decibels focus on hunting for the perfect hush. In The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want, Garret Keizer takes another route, critically surveying the cacophony of our industrial world.